The Border Through Times Square

One of many jarring passages, in a story by Nina Bernstein in Monday’s Times about how, in upstate New York, the Border Patrol has expanded the concept of its operating space to include passengers on Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses that don’t even approach the border—in an area a hundred miles from Canada:

Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba [the agent in charge of the Rochester office] replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

That is a sentence in which the word “technically” has very little effective meaning; “but we don’t” is just not that much of a counterweight. Is this a tool waiting to be picked up by a creative prosecutor? It’s also technically completely optional for passengers, some awakened by flashlight beams in their eyes, to engage in what the patrol calls a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation”; but they aren’t told that. (“To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option,” one train passenger, a citizen, told Bernstein.) And, once they do start talking, the wrong answers can get them imprisoned or deported—in a way that isn’t optional at all.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.